Roughly 97% of parking spaces in NYC are free.

whyfi

whynot_31 said:

It was more directed to BG, but you'll do.

(what appears below is an improved version)

...and what kind of response are you looking for? Golf clap? Sage nodding?

cool the kid

Boygabriel said:

What you're proposing (dramatically closing bike lanes late at night or during bad weather, right?) is wildly out of proportion to the effect on car travel that closing major avenues a couple times a year, or a few blocks here and there, have on a system of 6,000 miles of road for cars, vs what happens when you close off bike lanes on our 500 miles of lanes.

Speaking from a biker centric view, yes, bike lane closures can be "dramatic", but it's not as though once a bike lane is closed a road is unusable. There could even be daytime and night time bike lanes, w/the night time lanes shrinking down to reflect the lower traffic. Said lanes could even be made in the curb-bikelane-parked car-moving car setup to ensure the safety of bikers. More importantly though, as I have been asserting from page one, when you take off your bike centric glasses and look at city centric ones, said closures wouldn't at all be a big deal. You're talking about disruptions of less than 1% of the population of NYC for maybe half the year. Hardly a crime against humanity.

Boygabriel said:

I've already addressed this repeatedly. In very recent posts on this very page. I'm not repeating them again b/c you can't be bothered to read close enough.

Try harder.

I keep repeating the same points and asking the same questions because you don't answer them the first time, and embark on more and more fallacies and exposures of your bias w/each post you make.

Here...

No, the problem is that you guys are trying to treat this as some black & white issue where somehow, through logic games, we're going to figure out whether bike lanes are legitimate, or whether there's some singular, objective standard by which all public space use can be completely determined.

- funny you say this, as a few pages ago you were chiding me for harping to long on the point that the city's variance in density & design mean discussions about square footage have to be tackled at a block by block basis

The truth is that it's a complicated, ongoing discussion. City-wide. Sometime use-per-person-per-squarefoot is the metric. Sometimes it's "what's acceptable for the widest number of people?". Sometimes it's "what future problems are we going to face, can we mitigate them now?".

Strange that now the tone of the convo is "complex" and exploratory; your declarations in the first post seemed pretty absolute.

Yes, like I just said to WN, and I will repeat as often as you'd like me to: in theory everyone has to be flexible.

As I said, much of the response has been to the tone you set in the first post of the thread, and the backpedaling from said post throughout.

However there are 500 miles of bike lanes over the whole city. Cars have 6,000 miles of road to use over the same area, and a high percentage of that to park on.

Right, and for the trillionth time, on that 6000 miles are millions of cars either in motion or parked, vs at most a couple thousand bikers during a few points during ideal weather days. Why you give equal weight to both has been my fundamental question throughout the thread

Also, bike networks only function when they're interconnected and can offer people ways to efficiently traverse the city.

So, on a practical level, is it really time to start discussing rolling back the bike network that's still very much in progress and was just begun (by historical standards)?

Um, maybe? At best?

Questioning the execution of the bike lanes isn't necessarily a calling of their scaling back. Many of the questions have centered around the simple question of the best way to execute said bike lanes to best serve everyone in the city. Considerations such as the traffic patterns and size of the biking community, as well as ways to best compromise between the needs of bikers and drivers on roads have been thematic to many of the points made by people you've disagreed with. So I'm not sure where this sentiment is coming from.

Just to summarize again,

- drivers outnumber bikers by a factor of thousands even during peak biker seasons in NYC

- car traffic is much less variant, and thus much higher utilizing than bike traffic

- unless I'm mistaken, the essence of this discussion is to figure out how to best serve the most people possible with the public space of the roads... I think anyone who doesn't see that utilization rates are a central component to the analysis of how to best do that has a gross misunderstanding of how to best serve the city

cool the kid

The cheapness of insinuating those against bike lanes are pro-cyclist-death is cheap and silly.

I bike, and have had my share of serious bike accidents + ER visits. Guilt shouldn't be a driving force behind policy, as one can be guilted into doing anything.

mrs whynot

Cool The Kid said:

A person's parked car is just as "private" a use of public space as someone on a bike.

Using a parking spot removes the possibility of anyone else using the same spot - usually for a long time. Using a bicycle or automobile in a travel lane only uses the space for a very brief period of time. They are not analogous. For the same reason parking is not analogous to using a public park or using public transit. Only at the upper ends of usage does one's person's use of parks, transit or travel lanes displace another's. At almost all times (perhaps standing and stopping are exceptions) parking a car removes the possibility of use of the spot from everyone else - car owners and not alike.

cool the kid

Point taken mrswhynot. But my underlying point is, parking space or bike lane, it's public space that is unusable to people who don't have cars or bikes. So I'm still at a loss as to why bike lanes are such better uses of space. I mean it's not like one can camp out in a parking spot for more than a day at a time, so while parking spaces (in dense areas) are not as transient as bike lanes, when looked at over the span of a broad area & some period of time, is private parking that much more limited?

mrs whynot

It seems that this thread has two main topics. The first was the original topic which I will summarize as "what should the space now devoted to parking private cars in public spaces for free be used for?" The second is harder to summarize, but is something like cars v. bikes and somewhat more generally how should we-all move around this city we all live in? I'm not going to try to take on this second topic in this post.

On the first, there have been a ton of ideas thrown out - loading zones, garbage collection spots, bike lanes, benches, pedestrian ways, grass, picnic benches, houses, play streets, parking cars, parking bikes and I hadn't even gotten around to my solar panel/windmill proposal. Some of these are more obviously useful year-round and others are daylight/season specific. Some require structures, others enforcement.

A big problem is people's various methods of quantifying usefulness. For instance if about 1/2 of all households own a car, is a single parking spot useful for 4 million New Yorkers? Of course not. A single parking spot is useful for exactly one car at a time or about 2.54 people (average NYC household size) per day. (In some neighborhoods, people move their car more than once a day, in others, they only move their cars when alternate side of the street parking rules demand such a move making it more like once a week...)

But let's not nit pick, let's go with 2.54 people/day use a parking space. A parking spot on a yearly basis is useful to 2.54*365= 927 people.

You can use that comparison for one-day events or year-long uses.

Being that I am not measuring the utility of parking v. the utility of biking, the question is: are there other uses that would serve more people? The bike lane on PPW displaced a couple of dozen spaces. If someone has the exact numbers, please let us all know. But so the train of thought is complete: let's say the PPW lane displace 36 parking spaces, it affects 36*2.54 people = 91 people/day. Do more than 91 people bike down it a day? I think so. I think that is true in the winter and will be true in the summer. Again, if someone has the counts, let us know. But assuming my math is correct, is the bike lane a better use of the space than the parking spots? Yes.

Still with me?

How about a loading/unloading zone? How many people get a delivery on my block every day? A lot. Today the bulletin board listed that 50 apartments had packages in the lobby for pick-up. 50*2.54= 127 people. And my block has a lot of multi-dwelling buildings on it. So, a loading/unloading space that would knock out 3-4 spaces (enough for two trucks) would probably be worth it.

Would the same math hold on every street? No. If every street in Prospect Heights had a bike lane (knocking out about 1/2 of all parking) the number of bike riders might not equal the number of parking spots *2.54. But on a limited number of streets - enough to create the type of safe bike network that would allow wimpy riders like me to bike to work - it could easily. Probably in any season.

Similarly, on some Bensonhurst streets, double parking isn't a problem and loading zones wouldn't be a benefit.

Using the parking spots for kids to learn to roller blade would be a great use in the summer daylight hours, but a lousy use in winter nights. Could there be streets with no parking on weekends in the summer? Sure.

Feel free to apply the math to the rest of the uses...

whynot_31

damn all the Whynots are smart and wordy

whyfi

Cool The Kid said:

The cheapness of insinuating those against bike lanes are pro-cyclist-death is cheap and silly.

If this is in reference to my comment, it is yet another example of you not being able to read thoroughly enough to maintain context in a conversation.

cool the kid

mrs whynot, that's a great analysis, and exactly the kind of analysis that has to be done (and most likely is done) when evaluating a parking displacing bike lane (or any new usage). If we assign subjective weighting (i.e. "free private parking is a terrible use of public space"), w/every advocacy group making their case we get back to square one. So I think some kind of objective utilization (and cost/environmental impact) analysis is the only fair way.

I am seriously considering starting an engineering political party.

mrs whynot

Thank you. Not perfect, but a start.

If you expand your party to urban planners too, we can come up with all sorts of fabulous measurement tools. E.g. the BTU/DU l-cy efficiency of various vehicles (that would be British Thermal Units per dwelling over the life cycle of various vehicles).

This is probably why there are no Presidents who are also professional planners. (The Mayor of Minneapolis and former B.P. of the Bronx, yes.)

cool the kid

If we can utilize the talent of some programmers, we could even do some kind of projecting simulation.

"Sim City: Public Space Utilization Edition"

mrs whynot

Whynot is horrified that there are others who speak my language.

armchair_warrior

didn't read any replies too lazy to dig through them all.

My only beef is with out of town plates and upstate plates(I know way too many folks with bungalows and vacation homes upstate lol). They have friends or relatives or hell their old address to use cheaper rates for insurance which isn't fair!!

They should just make it residential parking permits and paid for a fee, a reasonable fee. Only way to get the parking permit is if your car is register and insured here.

they should have like guest parking spots without permit every few blocks. so if out of towners do come they could use the spots and locals won't abuse it. forcing those jack asses to pay for local insurance rates.

whyfi

^^^ That's actually a fantastic idea. The out-of-staters bug the shit out of me, too, and I think that having to pay real insurance rates would dissuade some of the frivolous car ownership. Also, it's hard to argue against getting some of the under-insured cars off of the streets.

boygabriel

Not to mention people with out of state tags actually having to pay NY fees for the NY roads they use.

whyfi

BG, you'll like this - http://thecityfix.com/transport-2050-the-european-commission-transforms-transportation/

The European Commission has released a roadmap, Transport 2050, for what they feel to be necessary changes in infrastructure.

One of its key goals is to eliminate conventionally fueled cars in cities [by 2050]

The initiative also includes encouraging a shift towards public transport, walking and cycling,

cool the kid

I thought getting cars off the road wasn't goal?

Can you guys make up your minds?

whyfi

Sure, when you start making sense - wtf are you on about?

boygabriel

Cool The Kid said:

I thought getting cars off the road wasn't goal?

Can you guys make up your minds?

Was that meant to be a real discussion or should I respond with something equally mindless?